Two Views Of A Hall Of Horrors

WASHINGTON — Myra Gourley, a nurse from Florida, was waiting alone in line outside the stark, windowless U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum this week, not quite sure what awaited her within.

A Midwesterner by birth -- she grew up on Dakota Indian reservations where her father was a school principal -- Gourley has seen the movie ``Schindler's List,'' and recalls reading Adolf Hitler's manifesto ``Mein Kampf'' in high school a long time ago.

But, Gourley says, ``I have never met a Holocaust survivor.''

While Gourley started her tour in the darkened exhibit hall, in Connecticut, Sigmund Strochlitz, who more than 55 years ago survived the Nazis' death camps, was getting to work as usual at his New London Ford dealership.

His and Gourley's lives would soon touch.

It was 10 years ago today that the Holocaust Museum first opened its doors, inviting people like Gourley into the lives of men, women and children like Strochlitz -- European Jews who were persecuted, tortured and murdered under the Nazi reign of terror.

With long-lived Holocaust survivors like Strochlitz, who is 86, counting down the final years of their lives, it will be the museum and its store of artifacts, texts and oral and visual histories that will bear much of the future burden of ensuring that their stories are never forgotten.

``The things I saw beggar description,'' said Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Forces, of a liberated concentration camp on April 14, 1945. It was the day before Strochlitz was liberated from Bergen-Belsen, to which he had been transferred from Auschwitz. ``I made the visit deliberately,'' Eisenhower went on, ``in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations to propaganda.''

Eisenhower's words are etched in stone at the entrance to the museum.

It took many years before Strochlitz could give his own firsthand account of what happened to his life and the lives of the more than 3 million Jews living in Poland when the Nazis arrived.

Only 20 percent survived.

``After liberation I was very angry. Bitter, angry,'' said Strochlitz, who moved to America to start anew. His faith was in tatters and he was tired of being asked to explain the numbers the Nazis had tattooed onto his left forearm. He had them removed.

He wanted to forget how the Nazis had come to his town of Bedzin. How they shot people in the synagogue who were trying to save the sacred scrolls. How they hanged people in the square and then forced the Jews to live in a guarded ghetto.

He wanted to forget the day that he, taken to Auschwitz, learned that his entire family -- his young wife, two sisters and both parents -- had been murdered together in one of the camp's gas chambers as soon as they got off the train.

Gourley saw those Auschwitz gas chambers at the museum, where a scale model fills part of an exhibit room. She stood silently and looked at plaster models of Nazis dropping deadly Zyklon B pellets, crystallized hydrogen cyanide, through roof vents into a vast room crowded with naked prisoners, whose bodies were then moved to ``Crematorium II'' -- there were five at the camp.

Crematorium II alone, she read, had 15 ovens, and could incinerate 1,000 bodies a day. At its peak, Auschwitz was capable of efficiently murdering 10,000 people a day.

``I shall never forget that night, the first night in camp,'' wrote Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, ``which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.''

When President Carter, more than 20 years ago, sent Wiesel and a hand-picked group to Europe on a fact-finding mission for a U.S. museum on the Holocaust, Strochlitz was with them.

Among the places they visited was Auschwitz. It wasn't the first time Strochlitz had been back. He and his second wife, Rose, whom he met when he was moved from Auschwitz in Poland to Bergen-Belsen in Germany, had taken their children, in-laws and some other relatives on a difficult trip back some years earlier.

Strochlitz still doesn't like to talk about the particulars of that earlier visit, but he came back with the Carter commission ready to recommend the museum and willing to take on chairmanship of the committee that started the annual Day of Remembrance observances in every state.

Instead of forgetting his experience, Strochlitz said, he is now determined to remember.

``It is with you every day and every night. It's something that you have to live with,'' he said. ``The nights are very difficult; I have some nightmares.''

``But I am not trying to eliminate it,'' said Strochlitz, whose speech still bears a strong Polish stamp and whose appearance belies his years. ``If you're feeling too good, it could create a situation where you forget.''

He even wishes he had kept that number on his arm, but he hasn't forgotten it: ``1-3-2 dash 4-6-7,'' he says.